Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Seven times in the past three years, veteran Pittsburg police officer James Hartley reported remarkably similar behavior by drunken-driving suspects as they tried to walk a straight line.

Hartley wrote in his reports that each suspect "stumbled after the second step" but kept walking, then "flung" an arm or leg out for balance before turning around, staring at the officer and asking, "Now what?"

It wasn't a coincidence. Hartley and Officer Javier Salgado -- Officer of the Year in 2001 -- admit filing dozens of falsified reports.

While it's not clear whether the two men discussed the practice, authorities said they used old arrest reports as templates -- often with few changes -- rather than writing reports from scratch on drug and alcohol cases.

In some cases, prosecutors said, entire paragraphs appeared verbatim from one report to the next. Much of the redundant information involved field sobriety tests used to establish cause for an arrest and a blood or urine test.

Salgado, 42, of Martinez, is expected to be sentenced today to six months' home detention after pleading no contest to falsifying records. Hartley, 41, of Brentwood -- who at times worked with Salgado on a team targeting drug-infested areas -- accepted the same plea deal last month.

Hartley resigned in April, and Salgado was fired this summer.

The Contra Costa County district attorney's office has thrown out "several" pending cases in which "one of the officers was the major or sole witness," said Mark Peterson, the prosecutor on the case. The public defender's office is looking for convictions it might challenge, an effort that could take months, according to public defender David Coleman.

Prosecutors and the officers' defense attorneys say the practice was motivated primarily by laziness -- with Hartley, who has extensive training in drug arrests, filing false reports on suspects later proven, through laboratory tests, to be intoxicated. In many cases, Hartley apparently administered a field sobriety test but lifted results from a previous report anyway.

"You give a black eye to the whole profession when you do something like this," Peterson said. But he called the motivation "laziness and sloppiness" and said that most of the suspects were indeed intoxicated.

Coleman said he took exception to comments by prosecutors and defense attorneys suggesting that the suspects weren't victimized by Hartley and Salgado.

The officers' actions suggest they were poorly trained and worked in a culture that permitted their deceit, Coleman said. He questioned why the investigation was led by two police lieutenants who had previously approved some of the tainted reports.

City officials may order an independent review of the case.

"What we don't need is an effort by law enforcement to minimize the significance of this," Coleman said. "The process of how we get to someone being guilty is a very important thing.

"Is the victim the system or is there a human victim?" he said. "We contend there are human victims in this."

Police officials declined to comment Tuesday but have in the past defended their handling of the case. Peterson, the prosecutor, said the inquiry was thorough.

According to court records, Pittsburg police began investigating Hartley in March after a deputy district attorney noticed that three of his reports, involving the same suspect arrested in different cases, were nearly identical. Prosecutors reviewing the reports told Pittsburg Lt. Brian Addington that "it was almost comical."

Addington wrote that he reviewed 64 of Hartley's drug- and alcohol- related cases going back three years and found that 39 had "appalling similarities." Salgado's false reports were discovered during the investigation.